Re: [community-group] Remove REM/EM from specification? (#218)

@romainmenke I'm sure neither phun-ky nor myself were advocating the removal of rem from the web specifications or impacting WCAG accessibility. Everyone understands we need multiple units, especially if they have programmed Style Dictionary for multiple platforms. 

The question remains, should rem be embedded in W3C Design Tokens specification? 

In the future, I'd imagine nobody would manually type W3C Design Token JSON files but depend on Figma Plugins to create the files for them. Because Figma edit seats are somewhat expensive, developers typically **do not** have edit access to Figma libraries, so they are unable to run plugins. Therefore designers will be outputting JSON for the developers. 

I'm a 'Design Technologist', so I'm concerned about areas of responsibility as designers and engineers interact with each other in our Design System. Simply put, I would not put the responsibility of choice of REM vs PX in the hands of designers and certainly would not ask the designer to choose the base font-size and unit. 

Though we'd like a world where we could output JSON from Figma, run it through a generic install of Style Dictionary and get the result we need, that won't happen. We'll always need to customize Style Dictionary, so we should let it do what it does best. Keeping the W3C Design Token Specification simple helps SD do its job.
 
Instead of adding an explicit unit to the spec, consider standardizing on the current unitless numeric value that indicates px (or traditional 1/72" point). I believe adding units puts the responsibility of the definition in the wrong hands and IMHO is an optimization that adds unnecessary complexity. 


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Received on Sunday, 21 May 2023 10:14:41 UTC